Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online

had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, ofMays, of Marches. August, December, April—name a month, and they had it in spades. They’d had endlessness. He’d grown up on endlessness and his mother—in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother . . . and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistling until December 1944.
    If Morty had come home alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning . . . Didn’t matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.
    “I’ll tell you what”—his milk-of-human-kindness intonation— “I’ll make a deal. I’ll make the sacrifice you want. I will give up every woman but you. I’ll say, ‘Drenka, I love only you and want only you and will take whatever oath you wish to administer itemizing everything that I am forbidden to do.’ But in return you must make a sacrifice.”
    “I will!” Excitedly she rose to her feet. “I want to! Never another man! Only you! To the end!”
    “No,” he said, approaching with his arms extended to her, “no, no, I don’t mean that. That, you tell me, constitutes
no
sacrifice. No, I’m asking for something to test your stoicism and to test your truthfulness as you will be testing mine, a task just as repugnant to you as breaking the sacrament of infidelity is to me.”
    His arms were around her now, grasping her plump buttocks through her jeans.
You like when I turn around on you and you can see my ass. All men like that. But only you stick it in there, only you, Mickey, can fuck me there!
Not true, but a nice sentiment.
    “I will give up all other women. In return,” he told her, “you must suck off your husband twice a week.”
    “Aacch!”
    “Aacch, yes. Aacch, exactly. You’re gagging already. ‘Aacch, I could never do that!’ Can’t I find something kinder? No.”
    Sobbing, she pulled herself free of him and pleaded, “Be
serious—this is serious!
”
    “I am being serious. How odious can it be? It’s merely monogamy at its most inhumane. Pretend it’s someone else. That’s what all good women do. Pretend it’s the electrician. Pretend it’s the credit-card magnate. Matija comes in two seconds anyway. You’ll be getting everything you want and surprising a husband in the bargain, and it’ll take only four seconds a week. And think of how it will excite
me
. The most promiscuous thing you have ever done. Sucking off your husband to please your lover. You want to feel like a real whore? That ought to do it.”
    “Stop!” she cried out, throwing her hands over his mouth. “I have cancer, Mickey! Stop! The pain has been because of cancer! I can’t believe it! I
don’t!
I can
die!
”
    Just then the oddest thing happened. For the second time in a year a helicopter flew over the woods and then circled back and hovered directly above them. This time it had to be his mother.
    “Oh, my God,” said Drenka and, with her arms around him, squeezed so tightly that the full weight of her clinging caused his knees to buckle—or perhaps they were about to buckle anyway.
    Mother, he thought, this can’t be so. First Morty, then you, then Nikki, now Drenka. There’s nothing on earth that keeps its promise.
    “Oh, I wanted,